Boonville To Briceland
It was the longest night of the year, the last night as well, according to the venerable old Mayan calendar, and it was an eerie one. The lightning and rolling, rumbling thunder began shortly after...
View ArticleOff The Record
MENDOCINO COUNTY has seen plenty of bad Supervisors, and we mean “bad” in the conventional sense, the sense that they 1. routinely put their personal welfare ahead of the public’s, 2. didn’t take the...
View Article‘We Don’t Negotiate With Terrorists’
Back in 1997, Warner Bros applied for a permit to make a movie on the Mendocino Headlands, a state park. According to the summary of the application ultimately approved by the California Coastal...
View ArticleThe Bear Hunt
One time many years ago Augie, Frank and I were hunting in Trinity County. We started north of the small place named Xenia but there wasn’t much in the way of deer. It was after one of those hard...
View ArticleRewriting Kerouac
“Great things are not accomplished by those who yield to trends and fads and popular opinion.” — Jack Kerouac More than fifty years after his novel was first published (in 1957), a movie has finally...
View Article‘How Necessary Is Public Vindication?’
On May 20th, 2011, a confused and nude Claudia Pedreros was found wandering on a remote Trinity County road. Her two and a half year old daughter, Sophia, was missing and later found drowned in nearby...
View ArticleMendocino County Today: January 3, 2012
WHO’S BOMBING HER NOW? By Bruce Anderson Most AVA readers are probably aware, however dimly, that a woman named Judi Bari was nearly killed in Oakland by a car bomb in May of 1990. The device detonated...
View ArticleThe Goldeneye Diaries
Winemaker Zach Rasmuson unexpectedly gave us another four-day weekend. He and 43-year old assistant winemaker Bo Felton were apparently flying to a ranch in Omaha to do a vertical tasting for Warren...
View ArticleBlam!
‘Tis the season for mass murder, fa la la. Nuts and loons go on full auto with weaponry the Founders would not likely have approved of, particularly now that the Supreme Court has read the line “A...
View ArticleRiver Views
When I was a boy and my parents had occasion to travel into town we would oft times stop by the office of The Mendocino Beacon to say hello to August Heeser, the publisher and editor of that newspaper....
View ArticleMore Miserables
On Christmas Day, several new movies hit the big screen. The most notable this year was the latest version of Les Miserables, which opened to critical acclaim. I sat in seat K2 at the 10am showing in...
View ArticleBird’s Eye View
Greetings one and all. If you are sitting comfortably then I shall begin. Perhaps we should take a moment to reflect on the passing of these Valley folks who left us in the past fifteen months or so....
View ArticleNote To Alex
The NY Times arrived this morning with the Sunday magazine devoted to “The Lives They Lived,” an extra round of obits for people who exited in 2012. Guess who wasn’t mentioned? I suppose if they’d...
View ArticleDavy Lantz Mountain
Ain’t many left alive that know Anderson Valley better than I do. And those that do know me, or have heard of me, or vice versa. The local graveyards hold the final resting places of a good number of...
View ArticleLetters To The Editor
WHEN THE LITTLE HAND… Editor – Back in the early 1940s a troop ship left the East Coast bound for Britain. As the ship cleared the harbor and entered the open sea, a crewman made an announcement over...
View ArticleMendocino County Today, January 4, 2012
THE DESCENT OF A NATION Compare the 1912 Elections with the 2012 Elections By Ralph Nader Before the electoral year of 2012 slinks into history, it is worth a comparative glance back to the electoral...
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Mendocino County Today: January 5, 2012
THE AVA’S ACE Courthouse reporter, Bruce McEwen, is looking for a Ukiah-area berth from which to resume reporting on crime and punishment in Mendocino County. He can pay a modest rent (very modest)...
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Mendocino County Today: January 6, 2012
GOOD TO READ that Linda Williams of the Willits News has re-visited the unsolved murder of Les Crane, a Laytonville marijuana crusader shot to death in his home by a group of four invaders, maybe more....
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Mendocino County Today: January 7, 2012
A THOUSAND LIVES — The Untold Story of JonesTown by Julia Scheeres isn’t what the mighty AVA would recommend as must reading, but for those of us who remain fascinated by a mass murder that got rolling...
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Mendocino County Today: January 8, 2013
THE NEW BOOK by Stephen Sparks and Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman, mentioned in last week’s AVA and reviewed this week — “Out there in the Woods,” an account of the double-murder and ensuing...
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